Business Central: First release wave for 2020 rolled out with new features and improvements

Microsoft has launched this year’s April
versions for its business applications. Dynamics 365 Business Central has also
been expanded and optimized in this course.

As already
announced, the innovations in this version are focused on improving the service
fundamentals (e.g. service quality, accessibility and security), new productivity-enhancing
functions and an expansion of geographical options and migration tools.

Optimized service basics

Partners in
particular have requested some improvements in this area, which were
implemented with the new April release. For example, the integration with
Common Data Services was expanded to optimize the extensibility of integrations
with other Dynamics 365 workloads. In addition, partners are now supported by
telemetry transparency. For this purpose, Business Central sends telemetric
data on various activities and operations to Azure Insights for analysis
purposes. This new function can support error diagnosis, for example. To ensure
that Business Central can be further developed without any problems, it is also
possible to manage outdated code in AL language.

New functionalities for more productivity

One of the
most important criteria, an efficient business application must meet, is providing
the most pleasant and productive user experience as possible. To this end, a
number of user requested innovations have been added– for example, improvements
in bank reconciliation. In addition, the new release offers, among other
things, the option to automatically insert recurring sales and purchasing
lines, an improved layout for customer and vendor documents, new notifications for
approval requests and the option to collapse or expand document lines and show
hidden elements on a page. Improvements have also been made to data entry, page
loading, tree navigation, the use of filters and views and the use of pages that
consist of multiple parts.

Geographic and migration enhancements

In addition to the functional innovations, the April release also contains enhancements in the geographical and migration-related areas. For example, the version offers the possibility of installing multiple language translations for each client and also add localizations for Slovenia, Croatia, Latvia, Hungary, Peru and Colombia. In addition, there is support for migration from the immediately preceding Business Central On-Premise version (April 2019) to the next higher Business Central Cloud version (October 2019). This means that a direct migration can be executed without having to perform another on-premise upgrade first.

Detailed information on selected, individual new features and enhancements in this year’s April version of Business Central will be available soon on our blog.